Thursday’s edition of WallBuilders Live, a religiously slanted history podcast founded by David Barton, addressed just-war theory, which Barton defines as “what you have to do to secure justice and the protection of life and liberties for your citizens.”

One of the wars he used to demonstrate his point was King Philip’s War, which he says started because missionaries were trying to get Indian tribes to stop using torture.

“The Indian leaders said ‘they’re trying to change our culture’ and so they declared war on all the white guys and went after the white guys and that was King Philip’s War,” Barton says. “It was really trying to be civilized on one side and end torture and the Indians were threatened by the ending of torture and so we had to go in and we had to destroy Indian tribes all over until they said “oh, got the point, you’re doing to us what we’re doing to them, okay, we’ll sign a treaty.”

One of the many things Barton leaves out is what really started King Philip’s War, which was European encroachment on Wampanoag land.

Barton didn’t stop there, though. He even had a commercial break to consider what he had said and he still came back feeling the need to explain why American soldiers wiped out all the buffalo in the plains in the 1800s. In his view, it was a way to cut off the Indians supply and therefore end the war and save lives.

“People complained about the fact that the American military and buffalo hunters went out and wiped out all the buffalo in the western plains. Doing that was what brought the Indians to their knees,” Barton says. “That’s what brought those wars to an end, that’s what brought the Indians to their knees and ended all the western conflict.”

Barton, of course, fails to mention anything as to why the wars started, which again is at its most basic due to westward expansion.
During the Plains Indian Wars, the U.S. Army tried driving Indians off the Plains and onto reservations, but warriors could live off the land—and the buffalo.